Koh: White House needs new Guantanamo envoy

Former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh is urging President Barack Obama to appoint a White House envoy to refocus efforts to close the island prison for terrorism suspects, an effort Koh said the White House largely abandoned in 2010.

"First, and foremost, he must appoint a senior White House official with the clout and commitment to actually make Guantanamo closure happen. There has not been such a person at the White House since Greg Craig left as White House Counsel in early 2010. There must be someone close to the president, with a broad enough mandate and directly answerable to him, who wakes up each morning thinking about how to shrink the Guantanamo population and close the camp," Koh said Tuesday at Oxford, England in remarks reported on the Lawfare blog.

Koh's speech reads in large part like a wish list for human rights laywers. He urged President Barack Obama to veto any future defense bills that seek to limit the president's authority to release detainees, for example. Koh, a former Yale Law School dean and current professor at the school, also endorsed a recent proposal to bring U.S. civilian courts and judges to Guantanamo.

Koh also said that if the fight with Al Qaeda no longer meets the standards of an armed conlfict, the U.S. would need to release the four dozen detainees the administration has deemed untriable but too dangerous to release. "That would eliminate the legal justification for these law of war detentions without charge and further the claim that such long-term detainees should be released after more than a decade in custody," the former State Department lawyer said, referring to the need at some point to end what he called "the forever war."

Parting company with some on the legal left, Koh endorsed the continued use of lethal drone strikes and he argued they may be more humane in some circumstances than other, more traditional uses of force.

However, Koh said the administration's penchant for secrecy surrounding drone operations is in large part responsible for the wave of criticism and concern about drones.

"To be candid, this administration has not done enough to be transparent about legal standards and the decisionmaking process that it has been applying. It had not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies. Because the administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone program, fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control," Koh declared. "The administration must take responsibility for this failure, because its persistent and counterproductive lack of transparency has led to the release of necessary pieces of its public legal defense too little and too late."